GRADD receives $172K grant for road safety improvements

Feb. 2—On Wednesday, the Green River Area Development District (GRADD) received a $172,812.80 action planning grant from the Biden Administration, part of $24.7 million awarded to Kentucky to "improve roads at the local level and tackle nation traffic fatalities."

The funds are part of $800 million in grants awarded for 510 projects through the Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) Grant Program through the U.S. Department of Transportation, which includes 15 grants for communities in the Commonwealth.

"Every year, crashes cost tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to our economy; we face a national emergency on our roadways, and it demands urgent action," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a press release. "We are proud that these grants will directly support hundreds of communities as they prepare steps that are proven to make roadways safer and save lives."

The competitive grant program provides $5 billion over five years for regional, local and Tribal initiatives — from redesigned roads to better sidewalks and crosswalks — to prevent deaths and serious injuries on the nation's roadways, according to a press release.

The funds received by GRADD were secured by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who supported the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which established the SS4A program.

According to a press release, McConnell also wrote directly to Buttigieg to advocate for GRADD's grant application.

"The seven counties included in the Green River Area Development District form an integral part of Kentucky's transportation infrastructure," McConnell said in a press release. "That importance will only grow if drivers can count on safe, reliable driving throughout the region. I supported the bipartisan infrastructure law in part to help Kentucky expand its role in America's transportation network and am confident the studies funded by today's grant will help the Commonwealth do so."

"It's a good program, and we're really, really excited," said Tom Lovett, GRADD's Owensboro-Daviess County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) coordinator. "We think we can do a lot of good for the community with it."

According to a press release, the SS4A grants support the DOT's vision of zero roadway deaths and its National Roadway Safety Strategy — a comprehensive approach that launched in January 2022 to make the nation's roadways safer for everyone, including drivers, cyclists, pedestrians and emergency and construction workers by stressing responsible driving, safer roadway designs, appropriate speed-limit setting and improved post-crash care, among other strategies.

"The biggest focus in transportation planning is safety," Lovett said. "We want to make everything safer. In the past, the focus has always been, 'Well, how can we make roads safer for cars?' And lately in the past five-to-six years, people have said, '...There are other people besides drivers that use our roads.'

"So, we have to look at our roads and say, 'How can we make our road network safer for everyone involved?' and that is what the Safe Streets (program) is designed to do."

The grant will allow GRADD to develop a road safety action plan in conjunction with the Kentucky Transportation Center at the University of Kentucky, while also analyzing crash data from its seven counties — Daviess, Hancock, Henderson, McLean, Ohio, Union and Webster — to create a list of future projects that would make travel safer for all users and streamline future grant applications.

While Lovett said efforts in road safety have been made throughout the years, he feels the improvements have been "anecdotal" — such as making a change after someone is involved in an accident.

"There wasn't hard data. There weren't work-based studies where we would go out and actually look at the road and have the engineers look at the design," he said. "It's not just where we need stop lights and what intersections are bad."

Lovett said the hope is to identify problem areas and suggest preventive measures to help alleviate issues. The findings will then be generated into a report "which will help transportation planners, county officials and city officials better identify the best way to make their roads safer."

"I think this will help us better prioritize our (road) projects ... and help us better identify where the money can best be spent," Lovett said.